Years ago - you got a minute? 20 years ago, I had this job building the paper mill in Sidley, Texas. That was the dammnedest site I ever worked on. I built that place from the ground up. Or underneath the ground up. I started out as a grunt for the pile-driving crew. In July, little boss kicked a laborer in the butt for leaning on his shovel and we all struck. Shut down the whole job by noon. Everyone knew it was shit work, hauling that fire hose full of concrete through knee-deep mud. A man has a right to rest when he can and that kid lasted longer than any boy we'd had. There was bad blood about that whole deal.

That August, a trench collapsed and buried three men. They were limp as drowned puppies when we got them out. One was a great big, fat man. We had to rope him up and winch him out like he was a big-ass valve assembly.

One Friday in the fall, I stopped at the little station near the plant gate. It sold the most beer in Texas for a while. I was lashing a case of cold Bud in the cooler when I looked out to the highway and there he was  hitchhiking.

I didn't think much about it. I got in and slapped a Credence Clear Water 8-track in the player and took my first pull. I wasn't very old then. 22. I'd just dropped out of Texarkana College, or East Texas State University like they call it now. You can't tell the difference by looking. Maybe it's different now - I don't know - but back then it was just like high school except all the pretty girls and all the smart guys had gone off to school in Fayetteville or Austin or Denton. None of those suckers ever came back either. I let the Torino cool off. I wasn't in a big hurry. I'd be going down to the Cedars Ballroom about 9 o'clock, so I could just mosey.

When I got down to the highway I took another look at him. A sawed-off sort. His shirt was open to his waist and I could see, though small, he was thin and tough. He had a chest like a chicken, all out front and was dressed just crazy for around here: an orange-checked, rayon shirt and a pair of those wide-striped, red-and-white paints like hippies on the Coast used to wear. He had one of those big black surfers crosses that they sell at Pecan Joe's hanging half way down to his dick. Red hair stuck out all over his little, round head. I stopped at his eyes. They didn't fit at all.  He looked dead at me.

I started laughing for some reason and opened the door. He trotted over, dipping, and got in. He said something that sounded like "Grootly vassoon sebodla."

And, Lord, did he smell. He stuck a pair of brand-new, orange Tony Lamas under my dash and after a minute of working his mouth he said, "Tank oo. Namma Bartolomeo. Ah 'ove 'merica." I thought at first that he was a Cajun or a Gypsy - we got a lot of Gypsies around here -  by the way he was dressed, but now I could tell he was a foreigner.

He had a blanket rolled up and slung around his shoulder like a Confederate soldier and a little ditty bag tied up with string. That was it. I wondered how far he must have come.

"Where you from?" I asked, turning down "Proud Mary." and handing him a beer.

"Bratislava." He said it very clearly and took a long pull from his Bud. Up close I could see that he wasn't dark like a Cajun at all, but real pale and what I thought was suntan was dirt. No telling how long he'd been on the road. God, he smelled bad.

"Where you going?"

He acted like he couldn't understand, shaking his head, so I asked again, louder.

"Vest. I be Cowboy. I want for to one day be Cowboy." He turned in the seat to face me. "In Co-lo-rahdo. Cowboys are Texas too, ne?

"Where you staying?"  At that point he looked up and noticed the black, Pecan Joe's surfer cross hanging with my dice from the rear view mirror. He took it in his right hand and his own in his left, showing both, he spat out a long line of things I couldn't understand, but I gathered he thought I was a Catholic, too.

"No. Surfers," I said, though I'd never seen a surf board up close in my life. Still haven't. "You know. Water. Ride them waves. You ever seen the Endless Summer?" I made a motion with my hand and imitated the sound of the ocean. Bart looked close at my cross. It had a surfer in full flight on it, instead of Jesus.

"I know! Surfahs!"

From that moment on, we were friends, buddies forever. Catholic Cowboy Surfers from Bratislava, East Texas. I took him home.

When we turned into The College Hill Trailer Park - or the No-College Hill Trailer Park as we called it - I'd had 3 beers and Bart had downed six and forgotten all the English he ever knew. By the time I stopped, he'd fallen asleep.

I leaned over, shook him and he startled awake. We tramped up to my trailer but he stopped at the door and then came in very shy like. Ducking. He sat down carefully on the edge of the couch and went into a long speech I couldn't understand a bit of. Finally, I got up and held both palms out. "Wait a minute. Hold it. Stop."

I went across the drive and banged on the door of my friend Herb Mazingo. Herb was a Gypsy, but of the semi-settled type. He worked across the highway at Lewis Auto Parts. Herb was small and dark with eyes the color of tar. His wife, Amy, was fat and blond and his five children looked exactly like her. Herb opened the door with the twin girls peeking around his legs.

"I got someone at the house that speaks your lingo, I think. Come over and talk to him some. I've got some beer."

"Hell yes, my Amy's 'bout to drive me crazy."

He shook off the girls and we walked back. Bart was unsteadily standing in front of the TV. He seemed ecstatic I had come back. Bart launched into a talk that had Herb squinting and shaking his head. Finally he held up a his hands and turned to me. "This ain't Rumanian and that's all I speak. Maybe Dad can help." He took a beer.

There was an old Gypsy camp just up the hill in a grove of pin oaks on land that had been involved in probate for 50 years. They lived in short Airstream trailers, like silver puffballs under the huge, dense oaks. Families came and went, but some, like the Mazingos, were semi-permanent. Mother Mazingo even had a sign out by the highway advertising spiritual consultations and Tarot Readings. Lost Objects Found. Don't Fear The Future.

Soon I could see Herb and his father picking their way down the hill. Herb parted the barbed wire and the lean, little man slipped through. Waddy Mazingo (for Waldislaw I guess) was in his 70's. He was erect, but weak. Herb said he wasn't fit for work anymore. That he'd been hurt in the war. He'd never said how.

We settled Waddy on the couch, put Bart in a chair opposite and gave them both a beer and waited for the fireworks. Waddy took a pull of his beer. It was very hot and the window unit shuddered and roared like a turbo prop. Waddy said something and then waited. He tried something else. Bart shook his head. He tried again. Nothing. On the fourth try Bart's face broke out in a huge grin and they were off to the races. They talked for 45 minutes. Bart got down and sat on the floor in front of Waddy.

At one point his hand shot out and grabbed Waddy'd right arm, turning up the wrist which showed 8 very faint, crudely tattooed numbers. The conversation stopped. Waddy turned his arm over and looked down, almost ashamed. They started talking again and kept it up for 5 or 6 more minutes.

Waddy turned to me. " His name is Bartolome Kollar. He's Slovakian from a cattle collective east of Bratislava." Bart broke in and shouted, "Goodbye Bratislava." He was very excited. Also drunk.

"What he speaks is Slovak which is close to Checho, which I speak. Mary's Checho. A year ago he and a friend were on a weekend drunk in Bratislava when they meet a Soviet soldier who sold them a map through the mine fields at the Austrian border. The soldier was OK and didn't denounce them but the map was bad or old or they didn't follow it right. Bart's friend got blown up and Bart got hurt bad. But he managed to get through the mines and the trap wire and over the border before he passed out. An Austrian patrol found him pretty quick because of all the uproar or he'd have died. You can hear people in a mine field for miles around. They took him to a UN hospital and he didn't die. For some reason I can't make out, he got frightened and ran away from there to Italy and stowed away on a container ship out of Florence. Cargo of shoes.

Turns out the Captain and crew were mostly Yugos and refugees themselves so when he got caught stealing food they just signed him up as a cooks helper. He was 8 weeks on board and sick as a dog all the way. They docked in New Orleans last week and he's been on the road ever since. He has no papers at all. He's illegal."  Waddy sat back pleased with himself, and took a pull of his beer. We all drank.

I went to the kitchen and got some sardines in mustard and some crackers and we all sat around ate in silence for a while. "Where's he going?" I wanted to know. Waddy asked, then said, "He doesn't know but he thinks he needs a job - with cows."  Waddy giggled the way old men do. Evidently, Gypsies hold farming in some contempt.

The phone rang. It was my mother wanting to know if I was coming to supper or not. I said, "yes," but I had a friend to come, too. Waddy let Bart know what we were doing and I gave him the last six pack. It was Friday and I had just got paid. My mom's a woman of real energy. She was the chief dispatcher at North Star Express. She had the entire town wired and I was sure she'd know where a farm job was.

My mother met us at the door. She took one look at Bart and one sniff and said, "He needs a shower before supper." It was an order. I introduced Bart to the rest of my family. He became very shy, the beer ebbing somewhat. I think he was knocked out by the house, which wasn't all that special but I guess better than he'd ever seen. He didn't know how to operate the bathroom. After he had been in there for a while, Mamma sent me in to help. Bart was sleeping in about 3 inches of water with all his clothes on. The water was the color of used motor oil.

I made Bart understand it wasn't working. That he had to strip off. I got him out and helped peeled him out of his clothes, which took the hair with it in spots. He was the same brown shade all over. I showed him how the shower worked and opened a new bar of Ivory. He washed and scrubbed with me pointing out spots to work on and bringing him new implements. I had to help him with his back.

When the first layers came off I saw something that looked like splashes of pink paint coming from his left butt cheek to his right shoulder. As more dirt came off I could see better: it was as if someone had taken one of those little ice cream scoops - a mellon baller - and, starting with his butt, had dug out shallow chunks diagonally up across his back to his right shoulder. The depressions were the color of pale, raspberry sherbet spattered on the pale skin of his back.

I looked around at Bart. "Boom," I said. "Boom" Bart said. I said "Mine?"

Bart spoke up for the first time in a while, "Russian mine." I supposed he was a connoisseur of border defenses and able to appreciate the efficient Russian mine from the shabby Hungarian mine. I suppose. Like most men, he was proud of his wounds. I talked about it once to a friend of mine who did three tours in Vietnam. He said it was a Bouncing Betty, a mine that shoots an anti-personnel charge up to about waist high before it explodes a second time and that Bart must have been crawling along a good distance in front of it or it would have cut him in half, like they're designed to do. Who thinks up these things? What were their parents like? Do they know what their kids do for a living?

I got Bart some of my clothes. They hung on him like tents. He didn't like the colors but was real impressed when he discovered that the jeans were Levi's. Mama was yelling us to supper and Dad wasn't happy with the delay.

What a meal! Bart stopped at the door like a man on the verge of a mine field. He had lost his map. I had to escort him to his chair. I think he hadn't expected to eat at the same table with us. That was a pattern that developed. He could be wonderfully open and even aggressive but would suddenly turn very shy and have to be almost forced to do things that you or I wouldn't think twice about.

It was a regular Friday meal at our house: chuck roast in tomato gravy, mashed potatoes, peas & corn. Bart couldn't have been more surprised by what was on his plate if he'd been eating with Martians. My sister tried to question him about his family back home. I told his story as I knew it. My mother seemed to think that there was a hearing problem, and not a language barrier. At one point I shouted back, "He's Slovakian, not deaf. Quit hollering at him." She was hurt

and shouted back at me. My sister shouted at her, taking my side.

My father, a hefty fellow, tucked it in and looked benign, which he actually

was. Bart looked bewildered but tucked it in too, wearing his head far down into his shoulders, like Dad. At the end of the meal, after the cherry pie, Bart stood up and spoke a long speech in Slovak full of growls and rumbles and salted with broken English, then raised his glass of milk in an obvious salute to us. We, taken, joined in and, for an awful moment, I thought he was going to smash one of my mother good everyday glasses. But he didn't.

We watched TV. Bart sat on the floor and kept creeping closer and closer. Dad had a fine, new, color Zenith and I don't think Bart had ever seen one. Or at least not one with three channels. Star Trek was on and I think Bart thought it was real. We had to keep pulling him back and making dire gestures about our eyes.

"It'll put your eyes out!" Mama shouted, "sit back!" She stabbed with all ten fingers toward her eyes, "Radiation!" Bart looked at me. I shrugged.

About 11, we went back to my trailer. As we sat on the coach, Bart taught me Slovak and I worked on his English. I've lost most of it, but let me see...

"Bed," was postel and,  "yes," and " no," were a'no and ne. "Candle,"  was svicka, and "shoe,"  was strivic or bota, I can't remember, maybe both. I remember "food," was potrava. We got up in the morning going on about potrava. "Hello,"  was dobry' den. "Friend," was priatel or do priatel (good friend) and "goodbye,"  was do videnia or ahoj. His English was better than my Slovak by a bunch but it's amazing how much you can say with just a few words. In a couple

of days we were chattering to each other in our very own lingo.

I got with the Gypsies and got him a green card which wasn't too hard. Texarkana had the farthest northern Border Patrol Station in the US. Those Gypsies know a few things about moving around and know the people who try to control moving around. Mama, being the dispatcher at North Star, knew everyone who farmed and what they grew. And she'd done about a 10 year stint at Red River Farm Credit.

I wanted to take Bart with me out to Sidley and get him a union laborer's job that paid at least minimum, which wasn't much in those days. It isn't much now, either. But Bart wouldn't have anything to do with that. "Cow," he said. "Working by cow."  So we got him in with a Baptist minister that had about 70 acres outside of Fulton. The man didn't live on the place himself but had set up a trailer for what he called "the manager."

It wasn't so bad, I thought. Pretty grass and pretty cows, about 20 of them. Sort of hilly up there and it was lush that summer. It looked like a place one of those old English landscape painters would have liked to paint. Those pictures that end up on the covers of JAMA in Doctor’s offices. He even had a TV.

Well, I feel bad about this, but we kind of forgot about him for a while. Not long, about three weeks. I was working and drinking and chasing tail on the weekends, and we all had jobs.

I had just pulled up in front of mama's to have supper on a Friday evening and there he was. He was sitting across the street under a huge loblolly pine. I guess from there he could keep an eye on the whole neighborhood. He was

squatted down real small by the trunk and if hadn't been for the brand new, white Stetson and the orange Tony Lamas, I wouldn't have seen him in the shade. But I did and he stood up and put his shoulders back.

He had a way of doing that. He'd stand and square his shoulders like a man shouldering a pack and about to get on with a job. He'd tilt his head, smile sly like and narrow his eyes and they'd twinkle. He did that now when he came up to me.

"I have quit Job. Not Cowboy enough. I go Colo-rado."  His pronunciation had improved. TV no doubt. He grinned like an idiot.

"Damnation," I said to myself because my mama had busted her butt for that job and it wasn't easy getting those bone-stupid farm people around here to trust a redheaded, blownup Slovak refugee with hinky papers whose stated aim in life is to be a Cowboy.

Inside, Mamma got pissed when I told her and we all started shouting at each other, except Dad. Bart just stood there and grinned at us like this was all very familiar to him, then he went and sat at the table in "his place." We all stopped shouting and sat down too and had a great big meal, like we always did. Brisket and cabbage this time.

We went to my old room afterwards and Bart said, "I am need money for to

go at Colo-rado bus ticket."

"Didn't they pay you for working out there?"

"Sure, pay. But must buy hat for cowboy. And he not pay much." This was true.

I did a slow burn but there wasn't anything I could do or say with Bart

smiling like a man whose plan is back on track. Who steps out after his dreams. He had stashed his bed roll in the bushes beside the house. We all piled in the Torino and went to the bus station down town. I bought him a ticket, $50 bucks in those days to get to Colo-rado.

The bus west was just loading. Dallas, Ft. Worth, Amarillo, with a change there for Colo-rado. We made sure he understood what he had to do. About a billion square miles out that way for him to be a cowboy in, even if there weren't very many cowboys left. My mother cried. My father shook his hand. My sister, who had pretty much ignored him, gave him a big hug and stunned him with a kiss right on the mouth. He wasn't much bigger than she was. They called his bus and we made him understand.

" Ahoj, do priatel," he said and captured me around both arm then kissed me wet on both cheeks. "Do videnia, do priatel," I said. Then he hopped up into the bus.

The rattly, old Grey Hound lurched out of the slip and he disappeared in a cloud of stinking diesel smoke. We looked at each other and went to have ice cream, which we ate in silence. Dad bought. We didn't ever hear from him again.

I went back to work on Monday and that was when it happened. A boiler-making crew from Hopkins had been putting up two huge water tanks. The big one was about seven stories tall and a slimmer one about five stories tall right beside it. They were filling them with water to test the welds. I was up with the carpenters building the forms for the floor of the 12th story. Heights didn't bother me then and I got around up there like a monkey. I heard a sound like wind - you listen for wind when you're up that high - and I turned around just in time to see the big tank split wide open, like a weenie in a microwave. Little men were sprinting away in all directions. It started raining sheets of steel as big as buses and an instant tidal wave shot out in all directions. All we could do was watch. It seemed like it took an hour.

Klaxons started going off. and we turned and started down to help. The bosses went nuts. Telling us to do all kinds of shit. "Go to umm! Stay back." But we didn't listen and ran in to try to help. It's a wonder none of us got killed too.

There wasn't a piece of those two tanks standing upright. I guess the big one knocked the little over because it was laid out flat and squashed. Men were screaming and shouting and puking and crying. It's times like these you need a woman and there, by damn, they were. We had five nurses and a Dr. at the infirmary. They were already climbing over the wreckage, white coats flapping like sea gulls, trying to get at men. But there weren't nearly enough.

11 men killed and 23 hurt. Men hurt all over the site; the tidal wave knocked over the saw shop and the office. Cars were piled up two or three high in the parking lot. The Torino was safe because I was hung-over and late to work, so it was in the back of the lot about a half mile away. When I got to it, the tires were wet.

That did it for me. I went back to the CC that next semester. I moved back in with Mama and Dad for a while, then I went off to the University and finished there. Then I came back to town and got married to Anne and we had the kids, bang, bang, bang.

Last night, though, I dreamed I saw Bart. He was riding a paint pony with a skull for a face across a desert somewhere in the west. And I knew that there were land mines out there as thick as cow turds in a winter feed lot. I tried to shout and warn him, but I couldn't speak right. He just turned around in the saddle and waved, grinning like an idiot so I waved back, too. But when I looked at my right wrist there was this long number tattooed all the way up my arm. And I couldn't bear to watch him ride through that and I tried to run away. Then I heard explosions behind me and water began to pour down and big pieces of rusty steel smacked into the mud.

Then I woke up. I felt awful bad. It was the kind of dream that makes you sit on the side of the bed for half an hour chain-smoking, just tying to forget. I don't have it very often.

If you every run into Bart, tell him we miss him. Tell him I got this place outside of town with some of the reddest cattle he ever saw and I can always use a top hand.